Making Class and Gender: (Market) Socialist Enframing of Traders in Ho Chi Minh City

Abstract

Over the past four decades, petty traders in Bén Thành market (Ho Chi Minh City) and Vietnamese officials have experienced and propelled rapid economic, political, and social transformations entailing reconfigurations of class and gender. Exploring the co-construction of class and gender through state and individual narratives and performances, I here make three contributions to anthropological scholarship on socialism and late, post-, and market socialism. First, I highlight the importance of associative gendered logics to government efforts to deploy new, morally compelling notions of class. Second, I demonstrate that socialist constructions of gender and class are not simply imposed on resistant subjects but also internalized as meaningful structures of sentiment, even among those otherwise ambivalent toward state authority. Third, I reveal that state socialist logics provide fertile ground for those enframed to exercise strategic essentialism (Spivak 1995) that affords symbolic or material advantage, even as it might also reproduce marginality. [class, gender, socialism, Vietnam, petty traders]

Making Law: Small-Scale Trade and Corrupt Exceptions at the Vietnam-China Border

“…In the two and a half decades since Vietnam's turn to a market economy “with socialist orientation,” marketplaces and small‐scale trade have become a ubiquitous, legitimate, and viable means of income for many. Yet the image of the dishonest trader has prevailed to this day in public opinion (Leshkowich ). Vendors are notoriously suspected of manipulating their weighing scales or yardsticks, of lying about the origins and quality of their goods, and of overcharging the unsavvy customer for the sake of higher profits.…”

“…Although upland ethnic minority groups account for the majority of the overall population in the province, Lào Cai City (as well as most district towns) is now overwhelmingly dominated by Kinh lowlanders. Female traders dominate the markets (as they do in Vietnam as a whole), but male traders are not exceptional and can be found in almost every market section (for a concise discussion of the co‐construction of gender and class among Bến Thành market traders in Ho Chi Minh City, see Leshkowich ). Ethnic minority cross‐border traders, in contrast, are prevalent at national‐level crossings (where Chinese and Vietnamese citizens may cross with a visa or permit), as well as at so‐called supplementary crossings, usually in remote areas where borderland residents are the only ones who are allowed to traverse the border and foreigners are not allowed to linger without special permits (for more on upland ethnic minority trade, see Bonnin ; Turner ; Schoenberger and Turner ).…”

Trading in broken things: Gendered performances and spatial practices in a northern Vietnamese rural‐urban waste economy

“…Although the waste economy's informalized spaces represent a source of income for some local government and law enforcement agents, the waste piling up in urban depots is beginning to disturb the urban planners. The depots disrupt the urban beauty and hierarchical yet contested spatial ordering of market socialism, in which socialist control exists side by side with marketization (Schwenkel and Leshkowich ). Nevertheless, this spatial ordering can be as enabling as it is constraining for the performative strategies of men and women from Spring District.…”

“…Similar accounts of performances shifting according to context and social relationships in urban Vietnam suggest that female traders tend to draw on gender as a naturalized category to facilitate their trading activities (Harms ; Leshkowich , ). Under the guise of dominant assumptions about class and rural‐urban identity, these women traders frequently invoke sacrifices for their children and their difficulties in maintaining family livelihoods as a bargaining chip in their dealings with customers and state officials.…”

Everyday Sacrifice and Language Socialization in Vietnam: The Power of a Respect Particle

“…I maintain that despite these differences, however, the elders’ and young girl's body postures and surrounding communicative practices tell, at least in part, a common story of developing moral subjectivities that help regenerate the sociomoral order, even if the content of sacrificial acts may change over time. Indeed, as alluded to by participants and Vietnam scholars (e.g., Gammeltoft ; Hong ; Leshkowich ; Rydstrom ; Nguyễn‐võ ), sacrifice as ethical devotion to the family and community can involve routine (if at times invisibilized) acts of suffering such as forgoing food, medical care, or education—or enduring poor health and even sexual harassment or domestic violence—to meet the perceived expectations of one's relatives or community, rendering “sacrifice,” in analysts’ view, an insidious and iniquitous practiced value. I have focused here only on routine displays of respect that range from the utterance of a particle in the course of taking leave of one's neighbors to curtseying to elders at familial events such as a death anniversary or house christening to bowing in front of an altar, in order to illustrate the relation between these types of interactions and children's socialization into not only filial piety but also into the more encompassing interactional logic and social organization of sacrifice.…”